Missing
the Mark with Religion, Part 1
Modern
Liberalism
By
Steve Farrell
Editor’s note: This is reprinted with permission from www.NewsMax.com.
One of
the most controversial and confusing of all issues for many
is, just what is the proper role of religion and morality
in public life?
In search
of the right answer, today, we are compelled to conclude that
there "is a famine in the land," with nearly all
sides of the debate muddled up to their necks in poor history,
poor politics, poor reasoning, and all too often, poor religion,
having nothing better to offer than a multifaceted deliberation
where few seem to know where religion and morality are appropriately
involved in public life and in political circles and where
they are not.
The unspoken
consensus, though none dare say it, is this: “It is right
to inject religion and morality into political debate and
public policy just so long as the moral slant parallels my
moral view of the universe, and it is wrong if it does not.”
Modern
Liberalism is just such an example of such hypocrisy.
Favoring
the relative ethics of Humanism and Socialism sprinkled “creatively”
with Judeo-Christian teachings, Modern Liberalism's cardinal
dogma is that "the ends justify the means," or to
put it ever so bluntly: "anything goes," including
any extreme imaginable, just so long as the political goals
of the revolution are served thereby.
Thus,
it is a “flexible,” “relativistic” creed, which turns a blind
eye to any dilemma of conscience that a constant round of
moral contradictions ought to evoke, one which deliberately
fights against all religious involvement in public life, while
aggressively campaigning for an ever broader interpretation
of just what IS public. That's troublesome, isn't it?
Yet, and
who dares point this out, the creed and its ideological high
priests applaud any decidedly liberal minister of religion,
campaign to insure that the most notorious among them are
glorified with Noble Peace Prizes and public statues, see
to it that their holy lives and hallelujah teachings are mandated
for inclusion in public school curriculums and textbooks,
and insist that their heaven-cloaked social and political
agenda be set up as the “beau ideal” at every “cultural awareness”
seminar, every equal opportunity briefing, every leadership
training class for public employees in the country. There's
no end to hearing their hallowed names in the halls of congresses
either. They are the new generation of Saints, the only Saints
for which men and women may reverently bow the knee, the only
Saints for which men and women must bow the knee, if they
know what's good for them.
Recognizing
the religious nature of most human beings as a fact, this
creed publicly denounces religious faith as mere speculation,
as the so-called “opiate of the masses,” even as it employs
every tool of religious manipulation imaginable, the most
popular being "the parade of victims tactic," which
plays upon the moral sensitivities common to all men, hoping
to create a link in their minds between the Biblical invitation
to "love thy neighbor as thy self" and the Marxian
mandate to "rob from the rich to give to the poor."
Further,
while this creed has banned our forefathers' Judeo-Christian
based teachings from the classroom, it has often mandated the teaching of the religious
traditions of indigenous peoples in those same classrooms,
especially when their traditions view property and natural
resources in terms of collective ownership.
No wonder!
The truth
is Modern Liberalism does not oppose moral law; no, not at
all. Rather it haughtily believes that it has a fresher, higher,
smarter moral perspective than that contrived by the rough
and puerile rabble. Thus, the advocates of this creed feel
compelled to share it, to order it, to mandate it. And with
the power of the state behind them they have met with great
success in decreeing their religion throughout the land.
Among
this creed's leading precepts we find more than a few moral
peculiarities:
- Unborn
babies do not possess the inalienable right to life, but
fungi, fruit flies and convicted murderers do.
- Ranchers
and farmers do not have the right to control, develop and
utilize their private property as they think best, but rodents,
predators and desert tortoises do.
- Business
owners who have put their blood, sweat, tears and a great
deal of financial risk into engendering an enterprise, do
not possess the right to creatively manage their employees
as per their best interest, but distant bureaucrats who
have never produced a single product for the public to enjoy,
who have never created a single job, and who have nothing
to risk do.
- Religious
fundamentalists, heterosexuals, capitalists and middle class
European males do not have the moral right to be treated
equally before the law, but hedonists, gays, socialists
and minorities of every other stripe do.
- Gun
manufacturers, gun dealers and parents who legally produce,
sell, or own private firearms do not have the right to leniency
and protection before the law for crimes committed with
those weapons by others (thanks to the principle of collective
guilt that Modern Liberalism borrowed from Fascism and Communism),
(1) but criminals who choose to misuse those same weapons
do.
- The
children of industrious and intelligent parents who have
labored a lifetime to provide property, finances, employment
and education for their family members do not have the right
to be eligible upon their parents’ death to inherit what
is rightfully theirs, but unrelated children of indolent
and ignorant parents do. (2)
- Finally,
because this creed defends the utilitarian moral position
that the good of the group and the rights of the group always
exceed the good of the individual and the rights of the
individual — except when the curators of this creed say
they do not — no business or businessman has the right to
decide its own social responsibility, no school or school
teacher has the right to declare its own curriculum, no
parent has the right to exercise his or her moral duty as
he or she sees fit — but the state does. It is the state
which must be fully trusted, fully the dictator of every
fine point of moral conduct (except, mind you, deviant conduct.
which must be protected at ALL costs as an unalienable right),
insuring that the state and hedonistic pleasures are fully
worshipped, and that free enterprise, freedom of speech,
traditional family values, and freedom of religion are crushed.
That is,
traditional Christians and Jews, traditional families, and
add to that list traditional capitalists, do not have the
right to do business as they please, to speak freely as they
please, to worship as they please, but Humanists, Statists, Communists, and all of their friends (including
— of recent note — Islamic revolutionaries) do.
This is
the ideology of Modern Liberalism — what some call dysfunctional
morality and others call Statism.
It is the religion most closely associated with one of our
top two political parties, and the fact that roughly fifty
percent of all Americans worship before this alter of state,
begging for free food, unjust privileges and endless moral
accommodations, stands as a sad testimony of the pathetic
state of religion, morality, and education in the United States
today.
Contact
Steve
NewsMax pundit Steve Farrell is associate professor of political economy
at George Wythe College, editor of the Liberty Letters (please
visit www.libertyletters.blogspot.com) and the author of the
inspirational novel "Dark Rose" (available at Amazon.com).
Footnotes
1. William
Z. Foster, founder of the Communist Party USA, in Toward Soviet
America, on pgs. 321-322, explains, "Capitalism blames
crime upon the individual, instead of upon the bad social
conditions which produce it. Hence its treatment of crime
is essentially one of punishment. … Socialist criminology
on the other hand, attacks the bad social conditions [that
is, the capitalist system, to include: the ‘greedy' private
corporation, the ‘divisive' Church, the ‘ignorant' home and
private school, etc., each of whom are truly the guilty parties,
being instruments of the guilty system)." The answer
to all this, he says, especially in more advanced Capitalist
countries like the United States, is "establishing government
control" over everything, in a step by step, systematic
persecution and prosecution of everything private, along with
other methods – not to exclude agitation and violence.
2. Via inheritance taxes and forced wealth redistribution.
